By 2020, 59 percent of Texas jobs will require postsecondary education, but in San Antonio's public schools only 13 percent of students graduate ready for postsecondary education by either the SAT or ACT standard.

The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board tracked Texas public school seventh-graders from 1995 to 2006 and only 18 percent of them earned any sort of postsecondary award, and in San Antonio, only 11 percent of our public school students make it through a four-year college within six years of on-time high school graduation.

The United States reduced its pupil-to-teacher ratio from 26-to-1 in 1960 to 16-to-1 in 2007 and more than tripled inflation-adjusted per pupil spending from $3,170 in 1960 to $11,674 in 2007. Yet, today our 17-year-olds are no better educated.

Among low performing schools in Texas, between 2003 and 2009, only three out of 95 schools (3.2 percent) moved from the bottom quartile to above average.

Empirical analyses by economists find that while some of these do help, they have not come close to closing the achievement gap between low-income, minority students and their more advantaged peers. That gap is three to four years worth of education by 12th grade.

The U.S. now ranks 26th among 34 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries for math achievement, putting it at about the level of the Slovak Republic, which has about half our per capita GDP and spends less than half per pupil in K-12.

Math achievement is particularly important because it is predictive of individual earnings and a country's economic growth. Our eighth-graders are two years behind higher-performing countries in math, and our 12th-graders are even further behind.

We cannot blame poverty. According to the OECD, “A comparison of the socio-economic status of the most disadvantaged quarter of students across OECD countries puts the United States around the OECD average, while the socio-economic status of the U.S. student population as a whole ranks clearly above the OECD average.”

Nor can we blame parents. Only five countries have better educated parents than the United States. It isn't spending. Only four countries spend more on K-12 education than we do.

Improvement in education has been happening all over the world. It just hasn't been happening here. That is, except in our small but quickly growing charter school sector, where we are seeing large networks of schools reliably closing the achievement gap for low-income, minority students and providing similar value in middle-income communities.

Charter schools are a variety of public schools created by state law to increase innovation, learning and choice.

There are several kinds of charters. Famous networks such as KIPP, IDEA, Rocketship, Carpe Diem, BASIS, and Great Hearts have “open-enrollment” charters. They are governed by 501c3 nonprofits rather than by the government. They are tuition-free, monitored by the state, and subject to the usual accountability measures.

Their property is public. If they close, their facilities revert to the state.

By law, they accept any student who signs up, including special-needs children, and they hold a lottery if there aren't enough seats.

They get to hire at-will employees whom they can pay based on performance. Their teachers rarely join unions (or teachers associations in Texas).

They draw their own enrollment boundaries, and receive no funding from property taxes, which leaves them with roughly 20 percent less per pupil than districts.

To wrap some numbers around the transformative student progress made: IDEA for example, serving over 15,000 predominantly low-income, minority students, has college-readiness rates like middle class suburbs, and its graduates completed college at over six times the average for its demographics — and twice the average for all students.

Another example is Great Hearts, teaching Latin, the Western canon, and competitive chess, and scoring 86 percent college ready on the SAT and ACT.

BASIS made the New York Times for beating every single country in the world on the PISA test.

Charters are also beneficial to the students who choose to remain in district schools.

There have now been 23 studies on the effects of school choice of various types including charters, and in 22 of these studies, students who remained in the districts did better. In the remaining study, there was no measurable impact.

One study used student-level data to examine the impact of charter schools on the academic performance of students who remained in each district school in New York City. It found that for every 1 percent of students who left a school for a charter, reading proficiency among those who remained increased by .02 standard deviations.

High-performing charters are transforming students' lives and replicating those results in new schools.

They are scaling quickly to serve the 100,000 students on Texas charter school wait lists.

The secondary effect will be to improve outcomes for students who remain in the districts around them.

The results are there, and the promise is clear. Charters will help to rewrite the future for San Antonio children.

Victoria Rico is chairwoman of and a trustee with the George W. Brackenridge Foundation.